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 Mailer’s Jungian discoveries and sympathies{{efn|We know that Mailer read some Jung. In fact, Jung’s ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' received an asterisk signifying its importance in the bibliography at the end of ''Castle in the Forest''. We know that his library contained Barbara Hanna’s ''Jung: His Life and Work'' (1991), but we don’t yet have a full list of what other books about or by Jung Mailer owned or consulted over the decades. Mailer’s Provincetown-study library is for now stored at the Mailer Center before being donated to Wilkes University, after which transfer we should have an index to the collection, including further works by Jung (Mailer archivist J. Michael Lennon tells me there are more in his email to me on 3/3/18). We know Mailer was contemplating a sequel to ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (''Harlot’s Grave'') with a Jungian protagonist. Moreover, Susan Mailer reported at a Mailer Society conference that her father questioned her (his psychotherapist daughter) rather pointedly about Jung in the 1970s. In January of 2007, during one of his last interviews, Mailer told Michael Lee in ''Cape Cod’s Literary Voice'' that he decided “on my own” that it’s as if “an unconscious was lent to us, almost like a Jungian notion” but “I didn’t have to read Carl Jung to decide this.” Mailer’s 2007 “notion” that “the unconscious taps into a deeper realm of knowledge that we possess,” if the unconscious “trusts you,” is also close to a classical sense of the Muse. Nonetheless, we have no firm evidence yet that he had read much or any Jung by 1955, although it’s obvious from the journal he knew about Jung, as so many knew generally of Freud and Jung (among other psychoanalysts) at the time. My speculation is that Mailer came to his self-analytic journaling technique by his own path, not by Jung’s, whose own journal wasn’t published till 2009. I offer this speculation (or challenge?) even though there are so many striking similarities between the methods and goals of both men and their journals. More archival work still might, of course, turn up some evidence of Mailer’s reading of Jung in the 1950s.}} stem in part from Mailer’s problem with Freudian psychoanalysis as it was generally practiced. Freudianism, in Mailer’s words, was a kind of “ideational lobotomy,” severing man from his deeper world, his soul, and leaving him adjusted to, marooned in, the “dead world of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/35|#35]]}} He accuses one New York psychoanalyst of being afraid of “taking a wild plunge off the Freudian board into the oceanic unconscious,” a plunge Mailer is himself now taking through his journal.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/529|#529]]}} Mailer, who mentions in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that he once considered abandoning writing for a career as a psychoanalyst,{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=108}} sees himself through ''Lipton’s'' as “embarking on the second Freudian expedition into the unknown,”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/159|#159]]}} just as Jung did in his journal, as well as in his decades of studying comparative anthropology.{{efn|See Jung’s ''The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature'', where Jung fully credits Freud with his bold accomplishment: “Like Nietzsche, like the Great War, and like James Joyce, his literary counterpart, Freud is an answer to the sickness of the nineteenth century.”{{sfn|Jung|1966|p=37}} I would add Marx to this list. “The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings.”{{sfn|Jung|1966|p=34}}}}
+Jung’s self-analysis exemplifies his own break with Freud. Jung not only became disenchanted with the limitations of experimental and statistical psychiatry. Even though Jung began his research into deeper layers of unconsciousness before he met Freud, he turned from Freud in 1910 because he believed that Freud reduced all psychic distress to sexual repression or trauma and because of Freud’s emphasis on the personal unconscious to the exclusion of transpersonal elements of the psyche. For Jung, psychotherapy could no longer be solely preoccupied with the treatment of psychopathology; rather, psychotherapy becomes for Jung, in Shamdasani’s words, “a practice to enable the higher development of the individual through fostering the individuation process.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=75}} It is not enough for therapy to adjust one to society. Creativity, psychic integration and balance constitute larger goals for mental health. Mailer’s friendship with psychiatrist Robert Lindner—who read and discussed installments of ''Lipton’s'' as they were being written and figures prominently in it—began when Mailer saw that Lindner understood the shortcomings of any therapy that merely adjusts the individual to the world, to the time and society in which one lives. Lindner agreed with Mailer’s feelings (expressed in ''Lipton’s'') that ''The Deer Park'' was “a phase, a necessary step in your development . . . . Now that this [book] is well on its way, you’re free to grow a new self.”{{efn|I am quoting from Mike Lennon’s manuscript edition of the Mailer-Lindner correspondence, which may be appended to a proposed published edition of Mailer’s journal. [See [[Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/January 27, 1955|Lidner’s letter to Mailer, January 27, 1955]]. —Ed.] Eventually Mailer and Lindner had a falling out over the journal’s contents. In Lindner’s view the problem was Mailer’s “insistence on projecting some of your doubts about the ‘new’ self you are discovering on me.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/March 14, 1955|March 14, 1955]]}} But Lindner’s private responses to the journal were by and large helpful to Mailer’s development, though they in no way constituted a professional psychoanalysis of Mailer’s psychological state at the time.}}
+The insights Jung gained from his journal, as I indicated, changed his professional life and priorities; those insights also informed all his writings thereafter. Jung described in his autobiography those years between 1913–20 spent “pursuing my inner images” through his journal as “the most important in my life . . . with the goal of psychic development of the self.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|pp=196, 199}} I would argue the same might be said of Mailer’s life and self-induced therapy merely beginning in 1955. Although ''Lipton’s Journal'' is more compact, much less filled with dramatic confrontations and dialogues with archetypal figures, and covers a shorter time devoted to the self-analytical journaling experiment, a case can be made that ''Lipton’s'' (which in [[Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/April 25, 1955|a letter to Lindner]] Mailer called his “internal dialogue between the doctor and the patient in me”) is merely a “catalyst” (to use Mailer’s description to Lindner), a first draft of a larger, multi-volume project.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|pp=183, 193}} For Mailer extended his self-analysis beyond ''Lipton’s'' per se and into the next decade of his fiction and non-fiction. For practical purposes here, I can only suggest what I mean by Mailer’s extended and public self-analysis through the 1960s.
+That public self-analysis was collected and launched in 1959 with the publication of ''Advertisements for Myself'', a first fleshing out of the ideas and the new consciousness Mailer was first approaching in ''Lipton’s'' in 1955. His introductions (“advertisements”) to each section of the book are his “muted autobiography,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} a continuation of self-analytical moments as he looks back on his earlier life and work, a sort of confessional analysis more fit, however, for public self-revelation than for the private meditations of his journal. He tells us in one advertisement that his journal of “self-analysis” with “marijuana, my private discovery,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=219}} led him to evolve into “a psychic outlaw,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=234}} a “changed writer”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=235}} even as he worked on the page proofs of ''The Deer Park'': “Finally, I was learning how to write.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=236}} His new outlaw voice and style began to emerge in his ''Village Voice'' column in 1956 as the opening salvo of his battle for a revolution in consciousness, “a seed ground for the opinions of America.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=278}} The new style was “a purgative to bad habit” and an expression of “rage against that national conformity which smothered creativity, for it delayed the self-creation of the race.” That new style became “the first lick of fire in a new American consciousness . . . I was gambling all I had.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=283}} We also see in ''Advertisements'' the emergence of the dialogue form that Jung had used so often in his self-analysis, but the real “seeds” of his future work, Mailer points out, are collected in the last half of the book—“The White Negro,” “The Time of Her Time,” and “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} It becomes more obvious that ''Advertisements'', the first progeny of ''Lipton’s'', is the transitional book for Mailer, and that his 1959 book looks particularly toward ''An American Dream'', the first fictional development of the themes begun in ''Lipton’s Journal'' and given initial public airing in ''Advertisements for Myself''.
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